Like this:

It’s very funny. I started blogging nearly a year ago, but with no regularity, and very little purpose.

I have a second blog, but that one is a little under the weather right now. Someone other than me started the account and now the domain name has expired. It’s either find someone quick who can re-activate it (someone with their name on the account) or change the name. Or I guess we could wait two months for me to buy the domain name back… We’ll see what happens.

But for this blog, I’ve been chugging along for a year. I started it to work with a class I took over from a friend. I taught it the first time without blogging, but the second time around, I just couldn’t see how I could let pre-service teachers make it through a tech class without blogging.

It came on the heels of me setting up a blog with my students to try to teach them how to write. I teach ESL, and we give our high-stakes exam in the spring. When I read their answers, I was appalled. Was no one writing with these children?

So we began with a math blog. Every Friday. Take the prompt, make it into a statement and write a paragraph. (Never mind that paragraphs were not developmentally appropriate for these students. I thought if they got enough practice with the structure that they would get it eventually. They did not.)

This year, however, we are doing the same thing with ALL of the second-graders. Not paragraphing, but answering a prompt, using the prompt to form their answer. It has been good. Almost all of them have learned that titles have capital letters, that sentences start with capital letters and end with periods. That in itself is quite a trick…

So I started this to teach teachers-to-be the benefits of blogging. None of my students kept up their blogs either. Like me, they drifted off as soon as the class was over. So my goal is to make sure that I reinvest. Revitalize. Revamp. Renew.

So on to the prompt: 10 things you should know about blogging.

1. Write early and often. The content doesn’t always have to be profound. It has to be. The depth will come.

2. Have a purpose. I lost mine because the course ended, and I felt as though no one was going to read it. But the course will start again, and I’ll have all this content there for others to read.

3. Be original. It can’t just be a repetition of others’ thoughts. But it can be your take on an event.

4. Try something new. There’s nothing worse than an unvaried diet. Try putting in pictures and movies and change the theme every once in a while, if for nothing else, to keep yourself from getting board.

5. Talk to people about your blog. Link to it. Let people know about it. Bring it up in conversation. If you treat it like it’s real, it will be.

6. Focus. No one likes to listen to a long-winded know-it-all. But they will listen to a short-winded one.

7. Be passionate. Talk about what you believe. Honesty forms relationships, for got or for bad.

8. Write.

9. Reread it because you more than likely wrote the wrong “its.”

10. When you realize that an entry you wrote last week is crap, delete it.

I’ve not been blogging for long, and I feel like I have a lot to learn, but I also know I have something to say. And if I say it long enough, maybe, just maybe someone will listen.